by John Everson
“But why?” Scott said. “If he had the ‘fountain of youth’ at his hands?”
Scott realized as he said it that he sounded a little condescending, but…really.
The older woman just shook her head slightly and smiled. “You can believe, you can embrace and you can deny,” she said, accenting the words. “I’ll leave ya to decide which one of those things your father did, fer right or wrong.”
Scott couldn’t help but smile. His dad had never been a believer. In anything. And he sure as hell hadn’t been an embracer or hugger.
“Have you been working here a long time then?” he asked.
Ellen nodded. “My daughter, Caroline—who took ya to yer room earlier—was born here. She came to me a bit late in life,” Ellen said with a smile that appeared just a bit melancholy. Then she blinked the feeling away, and added, “She’s a blessing. Aside from her, the inn has been my whole life.”
Scott considered that a moment, wanting to ask her about Caroline’s father. But some bit of propriety restrained him. Instead, he asked, “Has anyone ever tried to prove that the sap of the tree actually has a curative effect?”
Ellen shook her head. “You mean, in a laboratory? No. But we have plenty of proof that it does. All the proof that we need. A lot of folks have given a lot of themselves over the years to protect it for just that reason.”
“Seems like with the Indians out of the way, you’re pretty much home free out here in the middle of nowhere,” Scott noted.
“People talk,” Ellen said. “And people are greedy.”
Scott nodded. “I’ll give you that.”
“You’ll understand soon enough,” she said. “Tomorrow when you wake up…well…you can blame it on the amazing beds here at the inn. Or you can blame it on the blood of the tree. But you’re going to feel better than you have in a long time. I guarantee it. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
“Okay,” Scott smiled. “That’s quite an endorsement.”
“That’s just talking truth,” she said matter-of-factly. “Welcome home, Mr. Belvedere.”
“About that,” he began. “I know you’re probably worried about what I plan to do with the inn…”
Ellen held her hand up to shush him.
“I don’t know what you plan to do and it’s none of my business. But I know that once you’ve slept on what I’ve given you today, it won’t matter. You’ll know what needs to be done to protect the tree. It’s a special thing.”
“I came here to decide what to do with the inn,” he said.
“What you do with the inn is what you do to protect the Tree,” she said. “It brought your ancestor back from the dead. Without it, you wouldn’t exist today. And you must remember that when you make your decision. But I’m sure right now is not the right time. You need to have dinner and go back to your room, and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we can talk more.”
“It was a long drive,” he admitted.
“I can have dinner brought to your room,” she suggested. “Tonight’s special is beef stew with homemade bread.”
Scott shook his head. “I’ll eat in the restaurant, with everyone else.” He considered that for a second, and amended, “Or the common room, or whatever. Wherever you serve dinner here!”
She smiled and offered him a hand to help him stand up. “We call it the Family Table. A big dining room just down the hall from here. I’ll have Caroline come and get you when it is time. Probably in just about an hour, actually,” she said.
He stood and looked the older woman in the eye. “I’m not here to mess things up,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “You have to find your own way.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“We’ll try to help you find the right way,” she said, with a wink. “Now…” She stood and held out a hand. “Go rest for a bit more, and I’ll send Caroline down when dinner is ready. We’ll talk more later.”
Scott nodded.
Chapter Three
An hour passed fast.
When the knock came on his door, Scott was already in the midst of a dream. He was lost in the woods, and though he walked and walked, the trees only grew thicker and taller. The night was coming, and there were strange sounds all around. Animal sounds. Ululating shrieks and the call of birds, seeking mates or maybe prey. And something more dangerous. Something that was keeping pace with him as his walk grew faster and more desperate. Stalking him into the heart of the ancient woods. A shriek came from the dark brush to his left, and one of those ululating animals went silent. Scott turned to face that direction and stopped. A twig snapped, and the branches of a bush moved just a couple feet away. And then he was face-to-face with his stalker. Just as the face emerged from the brush, a look of victory beaming from green, eager eyes, he cried out, “No!” and fell backwards, scrambling to move away from his death…
Scott woke, to the sound of repetitive knocking on his door.
Just as it occurred to him that the knock had probably caused the loud snapping of twigs in his dream—he heard the metallic slip of his door lock turn, and then it opened.
“Hello,” a waifish voice called. “It’s Caroline, come to get you for dinner. Are you awake?”
“Yeah,” he answered, and before he could say another word she was there at his bed. She didn’t wait for an invitation, but sat down on the edge next to him, and put a hand on his shoulder. “I hope you don’t mind me coming in, but I heard you cry out in here when I knocked and I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
“How did you…?”
She held up an old, weathered-looking key of brass. “Skeleton key,” she said with a fey wink. “Works on every room.”
“I just had a bad dream,” he said, propping himself up from his pillow on one elbow.
Caroline’s lips pouted. She slid a long thin hand on his shoulder and dug the ball of her thumb in there, kneading the base of his neck. “We want no bad dreams in this house,” she said. “When I was a kid, every time I had a bad dream, my mama would rub my neck, just like this, and pretty soon I couldn’t remember what the monsters were that had been trying to get me. Mama says the good feeling always wins over the bad.”
Scott nodded, enjoying the sensation of the massage, but also feeling weird about having the innkeeper’s daughter leaning over him in his bed, touching him when they had barely even met. He was not at all used to people simply letting themselves into his room and his space this way. Still, the feeling of her hands on his shoulders and back was amazing.
“Is it working for you?” she whispered. Her voice sounded soft as a little girl’s. In order to reach both hands around his shoulder, she was now draped over him, and he could feel the soft cushion of her chest pressing against his ribs. That didn’t feel at all like a little girl.
“Yes,” he said. But then he pushed himself off the pillow, forcing her to sit up as he did.
“I should pull on a shirt,” he said.
Caroline let her hands slip off his shoulders, but trailed one finger down the naked slope of his shoulder blade to catch and hang at his belt for a moment.
“Okay,” she said. “But don’t put on nothing too formal. We’re just eatin’, that’s all.”
He stood up and pulled a brown T-shirt from his pack. She apparently wasn’t going to leave the room until he left with her. It felt odd to be pulling on a shirt as she sat on the bed and watched with unwavering bright eyes. At least he’d lain down still wearing his jeans. Normally he slept in the nude. Now that would have been interesting, if she’d barged in on him that way. Would she have just gone ahead and told him about good feelings chasing away bad if he’d been lying there in the altogether? Would she have even batted an eye?
He quailed at the thought. He was a modest man, and truthfully, he was glad he didn’t have to find out.
“Okay,” he said, slip
ping on his sandals. He bent close to a wall mirror and ran his fingers through sleep-kinked hair to try to imitate the impact of a comb. “I think this is as good as it’s going to get for now. I still need to get the rest of my clothes and bathroom things out of the car.”
“I’ll help you with those after we eat,” Caroline promised. “I can help you get all set up here.”
“I think I can manage okay by myself,” he said.
“I’m sure you can,” she said, standing up from the bed and walking to meet him near the door. She brushed her fingers across his hair, trying to straighten the same tuft of hair he’d been working at.
He shivered at the silky strangeness of her touch. He’d never had a girl lay hands on him like this so easily.
“I’m just here to make sure you settle in and have a nice time while you’re at The Family Tree Inn. I’m kinda like the welcome wagon,” she laughed.
“You don’t look much like a wagon to me,” he said, and that made her flash him a row of very white teeth. She poked her tongue out and made a playful face. Then she slipped past him—making sure that as much of her body brushed against him as possible in the process—before opening the door.
“What would you say I looked like then,” she asked once they were both in the hallway.
“My mom had a few sayings of her own,” he said. “She would have called you danger in a bottle.”
“Well, that’s a funny way of talking about a girl,” Caroline said. She took his hand and led him down the hall. “Why would she say that?”
“Because if you popped the lid on that bottle, there was going to be a heap of trouble, she’d say.”
“Did she say that about all your girlfriends?” Caroline asked.
“No,” he said. “Just the pretty ones.”
The Family Table was just what it sounded like. One big long wooden table that must have been able to sit forty people at a shot. It was rough-hewn but dark, like so much of the wood at the inn. There were only a dozen people around it right now, including Ellen. She was passing a large bowl of what looked to be mashed potatoes to an old woman whose hair remained dark, but seemed to have the furrows of one hundred and fifty years of seeing the world around her eyes. But when the old woman looked up at Scott and smiled, silently greeting him, her eyes still looked sharp, vibrant. A girl in an old woman’s skin.
“This here’s Emmaline,” Ellen said, noticing his gaze. “She’s been having dinner here with us for as long as I kin remember.”
Ellen pointed at the silver-haired man next to her. Scott assumed he was the old woman’s husband. The man was portly and showed a scattering of liver spots across his arms and the bald spot in the center of his scalp. “This is Billy Dean,” she said. “Emmaline’s son. We went to grammar school together.”
Scott raised an eyebrow at that, but simply said, “Pleased to meet you.”
Ellen worked her way around the table then, calling off names with a one-sentence explanation of how they fit into the inn’s family.
“Mr. Burton Lowe,” she said of a stout, tall man who looked to be the classic farmer figure, clad in a blue-checked shirt and faded overalls. “Burton kin cook you up the sweetest barbecue this side of the Mississippi,” she promised. Burton said nothing, but gave a smile and bowed his head a moment.
Ellen moved down the line. “Agnes Oleander,” she said of a thin, birdlike woman whose features seemed almost too pointed to be real. She was an artist’s caricature of a thin woman. “She used to run the front desk before me.”
She walked around the table and stood between two younger men. They looked similar in features and build—broad-chested men with strong chins and stubbled cheeks and hair that looked as if it’d be unruly five minutes after a trip to the barber. Their eyes were blue and mirrored their smiles as Ellen laid hands on their shoulders. “These are Agnes’s boys, Owen and Sutter. You need anything fixed—or broke—while you’re here, they’re the ones to call. They keep up the grounds around the inn—and serve as our handymen if we got us a stopped drain or a leaky roof.”
The two men nodded at Scott. The taller of the two pushed back from the table and stood, putting a hand out. Scott took it, and was met with a grip of iron. “Owen Oleander,” he said with a voice that rumbled like low thunder. “Welcome home,” he said. “We’re happy to help you however we can.”
Ellen put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him back in his seat before introducing the young woman next to him. She was striking: long wavy red hair, hazel eyes and a thin frame that boasted a healthy press of cleavage that her floral blouse didn’t try to conceal. “And this is Sherrilyn Cartwright, who’s been with us since she was a girl. Your grandfather used to tell of how he rescued her from the side of the road.”
Ellen stepped around the table to the other side and introduced the travelers that Scott had seen check in just an hour or so before. They looked to be middle-aged, and still worn out from the road, judging by the heavy lids on the woman’s eyes and the slumping shoulders of the man.
“Mr. and Mrs. Thorne,” Ellen said. “They’re visiting from Ohio and will be with us for a couple days, as will Mr. and Mrs. Arnell here.” She stepped from the recent check-ins to another couple, clad in shorts and T-shirts. Their faces were flushed and the man wiped a bead of perspiration from the edge of a receding hairline. “They’ve just finished hiking down to the Rollo River and back.”
“Didn’t want to miss the legendary cooking of The Family Tree Inn!” Mr. Arnell proclaimed. “I’m Jeremiah—Jerry for short.” He gestured at his wife, who looked to be in her mid-thirtiess. She had dark short hair and a tattoo of a mermaid on her shoulder. “This is Rochelle.”
“Rocky,” she said quietly to the table. “I like to climb, so it fits!”
“And that about covers us,” Ellen said, moving to the head of the table. “Things are a bit quiet here at this time of year, but it will pick up in a couple weeks when the Sojourn Festival begins up in Tall Rock and we host the Last Tap. In the meantime…we have plenty to talk about amongst ourselves. And lots of homemade cracklin’ cornbread, corned cob jelly and a bit of possum now and again.”
She must have seen the look of trepidation that crossed Scott’s face because she quickly patted his arm and added, “Not to worry, we won’t push the possum on ya right away. We like to ease you Yankees in…”
She winked and ushered him to a seat next to Rochelle, the mountain-climbing wife.
“Hope you don’t mind some company, ma’am,” he said as he slid into the heavy wooden chair. It barely budged when he tried to shift his weight to get closer to the table.
“Not at all,” Rochelle said. Her lips lifted into a faint smile. “But please call me Rocky. Unless you’d prefer that I call you Sir.”
Scott grinned. “You know, I always wanted to be a knight.”
Rocky lifted one eyebrow, but said nothing.
When the silence extended, Scott added, “Rocky it is then.”
Her husband nodded with a grin. “She can be a snit if you let her. So what do you do, Sir Scott?”
“Nothing too exciting,” Scott said. “I work for a real estate investment trust. But I deal with a lot of numbers, not a lot of land. What about you?”
“We climb things,” Rocky said. “A lot of land.” Her voice was barely audible but she held Scott’s eye. Her lashes were dark and long. For a second, he felt as if she was coming on to him…and then she looked down at her plate, and began to fumble with her roll.
Jerry laughed. “We do climb things,” he said. “And Rocky even gets paid for it. She teaches rappelling and safety at the Eastern Mountain Sports School. Me? I manage the lumber section at the Home Depot.”
Scott grinned. “So you climb wood.”
Jerry shrugged. “Sir Scott, I climb whatever Rocky tells me to.”
Scott had a hard time imagining the wiry wo
man at his side—who could barely be heard in a silent room—giving anybody firm orders but…he knew better than to pry into male-female relationships. There were always sea monsters to be found ’neath the surface if you looked deep enough.
At that moment, Caroline reappeared at his side, holding a cast iron pot with two large potholder mitts. The back end of a wooden spoon pointed out at Scott’s face.
“It’s hot,” Caroline warned. “So take what you like and I’ll move it down the table.”
Scott looked inside at the deep brown gravy, peppered with bits of red, green and white, and wondered exactly what he’d be ladling out onto his plate. He didn’t mind trying things on occasion, but he had to admit he was not exactly an adventurous eater, and the whole possum conversation still had him going. When he hesitated, Caroline smiled.
“We call this the Family Stew,” she said. With a wink she added, “Don’t worry, we don’t put none of the family in here, and no possums neither!”
Scott took the ladle and brought up a heavy scoop of dark broth, chunks of meat and what he assumed was potatoes and peppers.
“It’s beef,” Caroline said, before stepping to offer the pot to Rocky. “We just like to add some of our own herbs and seasonings to it.”
In moments, Scott’s plate was overflowing with collard greens and some kind of thin brown sauce, mashed potatoes fluffy enough to fill a pillow and a steaming roll that smelled as rich as any fresh bread he’d ever lusted for at a bakery. The stew gravy soaked into all of it, and as he forked the first bites into his mouth, he stopped thinking about what the secret ingredients might be, and instead focused on just getting more of everything into his mouth. Caroline was still making her way around the table with the stewpot when Scott pronounced in his head that this was the best meal he’d had in a year.
He suspected that the rest of the table would brook him no arguments, as the whole room grew more and more quiet as Caroline worked her way around to the end. When she was finished, serving her mother last, near the head of the table, Caroline returned to stand near Scott, setting the pot down on a wooden square in the center of the table. She slid into the seat next to him, and Scott felt the silky press of her bare arm slip across his as she settled.